Pop Culture Happy Hour: Edge of Tomorrow and Noble Failures

Emily Blunt & Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow. One of the sharpest summer blockbusters in years didn't open.

The Bruce Willis caper comedy/vanity project Hudson Hawk lost something like $50 million. I loved it in 1991. I love it still.

Writer/producer James Cameron confers with director (and ex-spouse) Kathryn Bigelow on the set of 1995's Strange Days, an ambitious cyberpunk flop.

Frank Langella and Brandon Routh in Bryan Singer's too-gentle, too-emo Superman Returns.

The ambitious but doomed Alien 3, for which Sigourney Weaver was persuaded to shave her head. The making-of documentary Wreckage and Rage from the Alien Quadrilogy Blu-ray set is better than the film itself.

It's always a thrill to be invited back on Pop Culture Happy Hour. I joined Linda, Stephen, and Glen to talk about Edge of Tomorrow -- the best would-be summer blockbuster yet in a year that's already seen several strong ones -- and noble failures. We agreed on the B topic before Edge of Tomorrow opened to less-than-stellar business, despite near-universal acclaim from critics. I hope we didn't jinx it, because this is exactly the kind of shrewd, fresh, self-aware big movie that seems to be perennially in danger of extinction.

I'd been summoned to PCHH this time at least in part because of my enduring affection for the 1991 caper comedy/Bruce Willis vanity project Hudson Hawk. This is, to my mind, a creatively successful film that also just happened to lose something north of $50 million in 1991 dollars.

I always over-prepare when I'm invited on a podcast. I came in ready to talk about a few other movies big genre films whose reach exceeded their grasp: Kathryn Bigelow's ambitious social sci-fi Strange Days, Bryan Singer's way-emo Superman Returns (to which Man of Steel's shrugging, genocidal violence was, I'm convinced, a direct, and stupid, reaction), and Alien 3, the fascinating, troubled sequel that marked David Fincher's feature debut and that he refuses to talk about to this day. Of those three, only Strange Days was a big money-loser like Hudson Hawk was; the other two did okay but fell short of their aesthetic objectives. 

Anyway, we didn't get to any of those. I'd even jotted down a quote from Roger Ebert's four-star review of Strange Days to read on the air. Having come from a screening of Steve James' wonderful documentary Life Itself -- about Ebert's life, career, illness, and death -- just hours ago as I'm typing this, I'm doubly sorry I didn't get to. We didn't even get to everything I meant to say about Hudson Hawk. Hey, it's a discussion, not a lecture.

I'll correct one of those omissions right here: One of Hudson Hawk's villains, Caesar Mario, is a guy who had a chip on his shoulder because he's the lesser-known brother of a more famous gangster. This character is played by Frank Stallone. That's a good casting joke, there.

Recorded but cut for time was an acknowledgment -- initiated, would you believe, not by me but by my Pal-for-Life Glen -- about Edge of Tomorrow's homages to ALIENS both large and small, from the armored power suits to the gender-neutral division of action-hero labors between stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, to the presence of Bill Paxton, doing a hilarious 180-degree inversion of Private Hudson, his panicked, "Game over, Man!" Marine from ALIENS.

Also cut was my observation that I'm pretty sure this is the first time a live-action summer blockbuster has won the approval of the full PCHH panel in almost four years of this show. The only other one I can remember coming close was J.J. Abrams' Super 8, which only Glen disliked.

In 2011.

Listen above or listen here.

FURTHER READING: I wrote about Edge of Tomorrow and blockbuster fatigue, and about PG-13 vs. R-rated cine-violence, and about how seeing ALIENS on VHS 400 times as a kid set up expectations that the 2012 ALIEN prequel Prometheus could not possibly satisfy.

The Career of Tom Cruise, X-Men, Han Solo, and the Wrath of Cannes. I'm on the Voice Film Club podcast this week.

I had a great time sitting in on this week's Voice Film Club podcast with my Village Voice editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson. Alan invited me on to talk about my essay demanding the death of Han Solo, but before we get to that we have a long chat about the perplexing career of Tom Cruise (working off of Amy's marvelous cover story about him) and Amy's review of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I won't get to see until tonight. You can hear the podcast above or here.

Radio Radio: On Downtown Boxing Club, for Metro Connection

Trainer Dave White

The thermostat at Downtown Boxing Club read 43 degrees -- Fahrenheit -- the Sunday afternoon I spent reporting this story for Metro Connection. It felt strange to be in a boxing gym and not be moving around. I've wanted to go train at this place for years; a couple of the guys I train with off and on have told me good things. Anyway, I'd better get on it: Downtown Boxing Club will have to move this year, for the third time in its 15-year existence.

You can hear the piece here. I was sorry to have to lose the part where trainer Dave White says that to land a punch you have to be quick enough to catch a penny.

Podcast: We Need to Talk About RoboCop (Some More)

Joel Kinnaman and Gary Oldman in RoboCop.

Please don't let the fact that my wonky Skype connection makes me sound like ED-209 stop you from listening to this week's exciting episode of the /Filmcast, wherein I was delighted to be the guest of hosts David Chen and Devindra Hardawar to chew over José Padhila's RoboCop remake. I'm sorry my smart interjections are sometimes hard to hear. I'm grateful my dumb and/or irrelevant interjections are sometimes hard to hear.

I'd also like to apologize to copyeditors and Strunk & White fans everywhere for saying "semicolon" (in RE colon The Raid colon Redemption) when I clearly meant "colon." Because as a beloved writing professor once taught me, when  you mispunctuate, you mis a punc out of u and yeah you know what never mind.

Anyway, please enjoy the podcast. It was a lot of fun. My thanks to Dave and Devindra for having me on.

Radio Radio: On Donald Tillery, for Metro Connection

Their debut album, 1972

1974 promo shot. Donald TIllery is on the far right.

Donald Tillery, Jan. 25, 2014

I have a story on today's episode of Metro Connection about Donald Tillery, a DC music legend who played with the Soul Searchers for 15 years. He's a fascinating man, and I hope I'll be writing about him again at much greater length this year. You can hear the piece here.

My thanks to DC music historians Eli Meir Kaplan and Kevin Coombes. Eli suggested the story, and Kevin provided insight as well as the promo shot of the Soul Searchers. Eli profiles figures from the city's soul scene on his blog, Soul 51. Kevin's site, DC Soul Recordings, is also indispensable.

Podcast: Young RoboCop, Old RoboCop

RoboCop '14 & RoboCop '87. The original has more gestural flair, and so does the movie he's in.

Thanks to Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson for having me on the Voice Film Club podcast this week to talk RoboCop, and to listen in rapt mostly-silence while they discuss Vampire Academy. I've not seen the latter but I certainly will, based on the impression HAHAHAHAHAHAjokes it made on Amy and Alan.

You can hear the episode here. I can't believe I forgot to plug the good RoboCop remake.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Silly Questions Live, For Special Guests

Three weeks later, my souvenir pint glasses remain fully intact.

I have a little unplanned cameo at the end of the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that posted today, the second of a two-parter recorded at the PCHH live show at NPR HQ on Dec. 10, 2013. That was the day my Slate story about the paucity of new songs in the yuletide canon posted, and the show was only a few hours after I'd been down the street at CNN taping a segment about that piece for The Lead with Jake Tapper. Someone in the audience asked for recommendations of new Christmas songs, and host Linda Holmes was kind enough to invite me up to suggest a few.

As I had been at the first PCHH live show a year earlier, at the old NPR bulding that's since been torn down, I was fighting a cold on this evening. I hope I didn't pass it on to you if we happened to shake hands. I did warn everyone who so much as made eye contact with me to wash their hands immediately. It's how I convey warmth and sincerity, you guys.

You can hear the episode here. Happy New Year.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: More Hobbits, and Christmas Music

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1973's Magnum Force inverted the premise of its prequel, Dirty Harry.

Thanks to Pop Culture Happy Hour full-timers Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and host Linda Holmes for inviting me back on the podcast this week to talk about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and a subject closer to my heart than that one, Christmas music. Have I mentioned that I'm very interested in Christmas music?

Our dissection of that enervating Hobbit movie feeds into a discussion of second installments, and some of the ones that really work. If you haven't seen Magnum Force in a while, there's no time like the present, Christmas T-minus five.

You can listen here or download the podcast from iTunes here. 

One element of our Hobbit talk that got cut for time was when I mentioned that I'd sought out a "High Frame Rate" presentation of this movie, because I'm interested in where action pictures might be headed. I remember James Cameron mentioning HFR as a potential new frontier in interviews from more than ten years ago, well before Avatar. (He has announced that Avatar's four sequels, coming in 2016, 2017, and 2018, will be released in HFR.)

I've read that director Peter Jackson messed with the color grading of the HFR version of Smaug in response to complaints that the prior Hobbit movie had a cheap, daytime-soap look. I love the irony that the newest, priciest filmmaking technology has the effect of making this megafranchise look like a shot-on-video-for-peanuts Dr. Who episode.

Anyway, whatever Jackson did seemed to my eyes to be for naught. Smaug has a distracting, video-gamey look that conspired with its pointlessly roaming camerawork to make everything in the frame feel weightless. I had a tougher time suspending my disbelief watching The Desolation of Smaug than I do watching the original 1933 King Kong, or a Ray Harryhausen joint. The illusion of weight, not size, is what makes impossible visions seem real.